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Snapshot

My Dear Friend,

She couldn’t have children, never had had children, and never would have children, so the rumor was. Her name was Elisabeth, and they called her “the barren one” (Luke 1:7, 24-25).

No small criticism, barrenness was cause for divorce among first-century Jews. And it also set unscrupulous tongues a-wagging. Yes, the ladies talked behind her back, and the men, too. Even the children probably joined in. Elizabeth and her husband simply must have been secret sinners, perhaps idol worshipers, to have thus incurred Adonai’s disfavor, so many cruelly reasoned.

But Luke says differently: Zacharias and Elisabeth “were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord, blameless” (Luke 1:7). Oh my, how unfairly they were treated!

So, when an angel one day told Zacharias that Elisabeth would bear a child, and Zacharias (surely) told her, and she then conceived, it was a glory-hallelujah moment, a time to shout the roof off! But Elisabeth reacted differently. For five months after conceiving she “hid herself,” keeping her miraculous conception to herself, her husband, and her God (Luke 1:24-25). Why?

She was humble. She didn’t need an “I told you so” moment to feel secure in God. Nor did she long to embarrass the critics who had long embarrassed her. She was not bitter toward them, because she was better than them. That is, more spiritually mature. She knew she and Zacharias walked with God, and that was all that mattered to this woman of truly Christlike humility (see Philippians 2:5-8).

But that doesn’t mean she had not felt the nails and thorns callous acquaintances and relatives had pierced her with every time she heard of one of them mocking her barrenness. Her “cross,” or unjust public rejection, was real, painful, long-lasting, and life-sapping.

Since she was “well stricken in years” when she finally conceived - perhaps in her late forties or even early fifties! - she had been stretched out on a very public cross for perhaps as many as thirty to thirty-five years! Then her miraculous conception changed everything.

It also changed everything for her cousin, Mary. When an angel told Mary that she, too, would have, not only a miraculous but also a divine conception, amazingly, she accepted the stunning news. Then the angel immediately sent her to Elisabeth’s house. Why?

God wanted her to live immersed in the atmosphere of the miraculous, not for an hour or two, or even a few days, but for three months (Luke 1:36)! He knew that not just hearing of Elisabeth’s incredible blessing, but seeing it and feeling it, would boost Mary’s faith in her own incredible blessing. And so it was.

For three months, Mary could see Elisabeth’s growing mid-section, touch it, and even feel little John the Baptist move and kick (as he would later kick the sin out of Israel’s remnant, Luke 3:7-18). No Greek philosopher or Jewish rabbi could sit down and calmly explain to young Mary, then just a teenager, that she was deluded, miracles don’t happen, and she should give up this nonsense and go back to Joseph’s house and behave herself. If approached thus, all the evidence suggests Mary would have had none of it.

For three months, she lived in the atmosphere of the miraculous - until the supernatural seemed natural, the uncommon commonplace, the miraculous mundane, and the impossible possible. Why make this point?

Sometime soon the body of Christ will experience a “Mary moment.” God will in these last days restore the miraculous to its proper place and use in His church. Indeed, “Unto you that fear my name,” says the Lord, “shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings,” and we will then “go forth” from captivity to carnal reasoning and rationalistically limited faith and “grow up” into our full potential as believers in Christ (Malachi 4:2).

The church will be New Testament again. The chains of unbelief placed on us by enlightenment philosophers will be snapped. “Barren ones,” like Elisabeth, long without a trace of the fruit of the Spirit, or His power, or His acts, will “conceive” a new kind of dynamic faith in an unchanged and unchangeably dynamic Christ.

There will be a midnight-cry awakening (Matthew 25:1-13). The gospel will be its power. Christ will be its center. His Word will be its light. The Spirit will be its Guide. Millions of compromised Christians will repent and thereafter live uncompromisingly. Millions more of unchurched sinners will surrender to the gospel.

As in the days of Elisabeth and Mary, miracles, deliverances, and healings of soul and body will flow like a river. All will point to and lift up no one but Jesus, real and living among us by His Spirit. All the gifts of the Spirit will operate in their proper place. Ministers and laymen will minister these special graces with special grace, without boasting or covetousness and with spiritual sensitivity, compassion, and humility. They will show up but not show off, and come not to get but to give.

Reborn and rebaptized with the Spirit again, churches will set aside their political preoccupations, and the King, His kingdom, evangelism, and discipleship will again be front and center. We will transition from worshiping in smoke and lights to worshiping in Spirit and truth. Churches' agendas will be radically simplified. The signs of the times will be recognized, interpreted, and believed, as End-Times learning produces End-Times living (2 Peter 3:10-14). Not few but many ministers will know the times and what the body of Christ should do - that Christ’s long-awaited appearing is drawing near and we must walk closely with Him, as Enoch did, to be ready. They will lead us from the darkness of rapture presumption into the light of rapture preparation.

Like Elisabeth, the church’s reproach for being fruitless, and spiritually and socially impotent, will vanish. Like Mary, every day of this awakening we will live in the atmosphere of the miraculous until it is no longer extraordinary but expected.

And, don’t forget, what could be more miraculous than one powerfully changed life, with radically cleansed motives, thoroughly changed habits, fully healed emotions, and the peace of God replacing the discontent of sin?

“Oh, Lord, today, please send us the atmosphere of the miraculous!”

Watching, waiting, believing…